


Five things that happen to Peggy Carter after V-E Day

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 16:55:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1234045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy misses her life before the war, life before Steve.</p><p>(Written October 2011)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five things that happen to Peggy Carter after V-E Day

 

 

**[one]**

There's no funeral.

There's no body to bury so there's no funeral, just a note on his file saying “missing in action, considered killed”. If you sum it all up – this, and the family history – it's rather depressing: father killed in the war, mother killed in the war. Steve missing. Plus there's Bucky to think about, another sad note. Another body they haven't found.

Glorious pages and bitter footnotes.

They celebrate all the deaths, not just Steve's disappearance. She makes a mental note to speak to Bucky's family next time she is in the States. At least she can do that for Steve.

(she does not think about what tracking down Steve's family would have been like, telling them, explaining, using the word _hero_ in front of them - she is secretly relieved he has none, there's no one to claim her useless apologies)

Howard is quiet that day. Which is creepy. Taking very little time off a mission Peggy doesn't want to think about. A mission goal which she herself issued. She hates Howard for making her think about hope.

Instead they talk about everybody else.

`I think there should be a law banning the talk about dead people. Once people are gone they are gone. We should pretend they never existed at all.´

Howard is a bit drunk – _surprising_ , really– but she can tell he means it.

`Have you ever lost somebody close?´

`Haven't we all?´ he replies, arching an eyebrow.

Funny, because when she met him she would have thought Howard Stark hadn't had a single day of suffering in his life. She knows better by now, which isn't a feeling she particularly relishes, she'd rather have stayed prejudiced and ignorant, the brave and proud and senseless girl she was at the beginning of the war. She misses that Peggy Carter. She misses 1939. She misses her life before Steve Rogers.

 

 

**[two]**

Colonel Phillips gives her two weeks off; a soldier's job doesn't finish when war does and she is, above all else, a soldier.

She decides to stay in London for the time being. It's a bad idea. The bombed out buildings, like skinned-alive animals, the hunger and the stunned faces around her, it doesn't help. The worst part is not the burnt city, but that it somehow could have survived. The skeleton exposed, the bare bones of the city, they stick out of the ground not proud but woeful. How can they go on after all this?

Peggy lives like a ghost for a couple of days, until he meets Falsworth in a semi-blasted restaurant near Bedford Square. They find out they come from the same area in Gloucestershire, but neither of them want to go home after all that's happened. That deserves a toast, one of them says but they are not sure exactly who.

`I feel like I am living a borrowed life,´ he says, James does, because he asked her to call him James, because this is peacetime after all, and they are on leave. `I should have died that night at Schmidt's base.´

He doesn't talk about it like it's a gift. Peggy can understand that. There is not the joy that should be, finding herself alive among the ruins. She doesn't feel lucky. She doesn't feel relieved.

The crave for connection is sharp; James invites him up his rented flat in bombed Bloomsbury for a last drink but it wouldn't be fair. It's not like she feels she would be being unfaithful. It's that it would be too easy. It would dull the pain.

Peggy wants to keep her pain intact.

 

 

**[three]**

Howard continues the search for months. That surprises her.

`You asked me to,´ he says once, flatly, when she tries to thank him for his persistence.

She is not thankful. And he can't be doing all this for her. Not entirely.

 

 

**[four]**

It's been dead for a long time but now – _now with Steve gone_ – the Army wants the Super-Soldier Serum data and everything relating to it or any other research by Dr Erskine buried. There were some, low-level, papers that could go to his family but the rest was to be boxed and sealed and concealed forever in the entrails of some government building.

Thinking about it now, Peggy feels as if the Project belonged to another era, something that happened to other people, not her and Steve and the others. Just like war has started to feel like a strange, unthinkable dream.

Scrawny kid becomes Captain America: surely it was just another story, another propaganda lie they fed the public.

`So this is how it all ends,´ Howard says when they tackle the last reminder: Erskine's office.

It's finally up to her and Howard to sort out the documents and to put the final seal on the project. Howard obviously because no one else understands the science part of it all. She is not sure why Colonel Phillips asked her to come back to America. Perhaps he is trying to give her some closure. Perhaps her bosses think she is the only person tolerant enough of Howard Stark to work with him.

She doesn't know exactly what the Army has promised Howard but she guesses he can take a stab at all the research, since he was part of it. She can imagine Phillips not being very comfortable knowing he is putting classified information in Stark's way.

Between box and box Howard has been taking swings at a bottle of scotch he somehow slipped into the laboratory without Peggy noticing.

By the time they finish he is completely drunk. And not regular-Howard drunk. Not the kind of drunk Peggy is used to see him. His voice still sounds frostbitten.

`Let me take you home.´

`Why, Miss Carter, I thought you'd never ask,´ Howard says but it's all half-hearted, as if he couldn't possibly be as rude as to not try to have sex with her. As if Peggy might take offence if he didn't.

They take a cab to Howard's absolutely preposterous house in Manhattan.

In the end she does have to help him get into bed.

He grabs her wrist gently when she is about to leave. Peggy understands; after all it would be uncharacteristic of Howard to say things like _stay_.

Instead he says: `I know many a gal who would be jealous of the _position_ you find yourself in right now.´

She gets into bed with him, still in her uniform. The bed is big enough. Everything in Howard's house is big enough, absurdly luxurious. Still he moves closer to her. Peggy understands the need for connection, but this time it's not about her. She can feel Howard's warm body behind her back, not touching her, his breathing becoming less and less of a struggle, his muscles relaxing. She wonders when was the last time she saw Howard relax. She can't remember a single time.

Finally when she thinks he has fallen asleep he speaks, his voice clear and scrapped:

`He was ridiculous. Wasn't he?´

Peggy presses her face against the soft pillow. She lets out a noise of agreement. There's no need to clarify who he is talking about. They have been having this conversation for months, without wanting to acknowledge it.

`Ridiculous,´ he repeats before falling asleep. Peggy is sure of that this time because she hears him starting to snore.

 _Ridiculous_ , she says to herself, and leave it up to bloody Howard Stark to perfectly sum him up in one word.

 

 

 

 

**[five]**

She goes to Brooklyn and sits on a diner with windows to the river.

She orders coffee and pancakes and folds and unfolds the napkin in her hand. She wonders if this is the kind of place Steve grew up around. She can see him easily in cafes and diners, soaking up strangers' conversations while gently disappearing into the background. She can imagine his childhood full of friends with unruly hair and worn baseball gloves.

It's no use trying to imagine what he was like before she knew him.

It's no use resenting the conversations never had; she wishes they had talked more, and more extensively, about their lives. She wants to know. She wants him to know. She wants to ask Steve about his favourite movies, his mother's name, if he ever had a dog when he was a kid. She wants to tell Steve about the smell of her father's library where she spent many an hour as a teenager, she wants him to know how it felt like the first time she shot somebody.

She orders a big breakfast and imagines this is the kind of place where Steve would take her after a date, after spending the night together for the first time. Weak coffee and all.

And she feels angry because she feels robbed; they should have had these conversations, they should have had more kisses, sex, _a future_. She should see Steve grow old and he should see her grow old. There should have been picnics in the park and the sun pressing little stars under their eyes when they closed them as Steve bent to kiss her. There should have been much, much _more_.

Instead this: the lively sunlight of Sunday morning Brooklyn offers no comfort, it's cold, her hands have gone numb as she walked, Peggy looks across the water into the city; she feels she knows him better for being here, standing here at this spot where he might have stood once, but that is a curse in itself. Even if it's after the fact, the more she knows Steve the deeper the _could have been_ s, the _should have been_ s bite.


End file.
